The demise of West Coast college basketball?

Wichita State guard Malcolm Armstead, right, works against Ohio State guard Aaron Craft (4) during the second half of the West Regional final in the NCAA men's college basketball tournament, Saturday, March 30, 2013, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
— AP

Wichita State guard Malcolm Armstead, right, works against Ohio State guard Aaron Craft (4) during the second half of the West Regional final in the NCAA men's college basketball tournament, Saturday, March 30, 2013, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
/ AP

ATLANTA  Malcolm Armstead is a 6-foot-1, 205-pound fire hydrant disguised as a basketball player, a linebacker masquerading as a point guard. He went from Central Park Christian High in Birmingham, Ala., to Chipola College in Marianna, Fla., to Oregon, where he started 52 games in two seasons.

What did he learn in his time on the West Coast?

“That I needed to leave,” Armstead says.

So he did. He went to Wichita State of the Missouri Valley Conference even though the Shockers had no scholarships available, working at a car dealership and taking out student loans while he sat out last season as a transfer. Armstead arrived in Wichita, saw the roster of junkyard dogs that Coach Gregg Marshall had assembled, saw the tough, physical brand of basketball, and told anyone who would listen that they would reach the Final Four – which they did, facing Louisville on Saturday afternoon in Atlanta.

“It was too finesse for me,” Armstead says of his West Coast experiment. “I’m a physical player. I like all the bumping and banging. That’s the way I like to play. I had to get back to that.”

Maybe Armstead is just one guy with an interesting story, maybe it’s just the unpredictability of a one-and-done tournament after a 30-game season, maybe it’s one of those cyclical patterns that will eventually correct itself. Or maybe that hissing sound you hear is college basketball in the western third of the country deflating.

This is the fifth straight Final Four without a team from the Mountain or Pacific time zone, the longest such drought in nearly two decades. Wichita State is the most western representative in a Final Four since UCLA went in 2006, 2007 and 2008; it’s 1,170 miles from the Pacific Ocean.

The past five years: one western school in the Elite Eight (Arizona in 2011), eight in the Sweet 16.

The five years before that: three in the Final Four, five in the Elite Eight, 14 in the Sweet 16.

Of 62 players on the rosters in Atlanta this weekend, just two are from west of Scott City, Kan. One is Louisville’s Peyton Siva from Seattle. The other is Wichita State’s Demetric Williams from Las Vegas. Both are undersized guards. Both are seniors. Otherwise, Louisville, Wichita State, Syracuse and Michigan populated their rosters with players from their immediate geographical areas – and points east.

Two caveats: Only one-sixth of the 347 schools that play NCAA Division I college basketball are in the “west,” roughly defined as the 11 states in the Mountain and Pacific time zones. And the NCAA Tournament can erase a fine season in a mere 40 minutes, as it did with No. 1 Gonzaga when ninth-seeded Wichita State made five straight 3-pointers in the final 6:05 two weekends ago.

“You play one bad game and you’re out of the tournament,” USD coach Bill Grier says. “Or you play a couple good games like Florida Gulf Coast and you’re in the Sweet 16. Sometimes the body of work of what you do over five months doesn’t get looked at.”

But the tournament also provides something else. It mixes schools from different regions that typically don’t play, and in recent years the teams from the rest of the country are, literally, beating up the kids out west. A bruised body of work, apparently, is better than a lithe, tanned one.

The theory goes like this: Scoring is at record lows in college basketball (the 67.6 points per game is the lowest since 1952) in part because fouls are being whistled at record lows. And teams from the Midwest, South and East are better equipped to handle this flight from finesse.

“The game is officiated differently out here,” says Chris Carlson, the head coach at UC San Diego who worked on Ben Howland’s staff at Pitt and UCLA. “You’re talking to a guy who was part of Pitt-UConn battles. Those were wars. It was no autopsy, no foul.

“You get a game officiated by Pac-12 officials, it’s a totally different game than back East. I know people say that’s b.s. But I’m telling you, it’s not.”

It’s not just the guys in stripes, either. It’s the guys in shorts.

San Diego State assistant coach Tony Bland left Los Angeles for Syracuse as a 6-5, 180-pound freshman guard.

“All of a sudden, I’m going up against 6-3, 220-pound 23-year-olds,” says Bland, who transferred to SDSU after two seasons. “I’m like, ‘These dudes are grown men.’ Out West, it’s much more high-flying, up and down, long, athletic. Back East, it’s big, strong, physical, grind it out.”

One begats the other. While girls typically are fully grown by their freshman or sophomore year of high school, boys mature later – still growing and adding weight into their late teens and even early 20s. It can be a huge advantage in a game becoming increasingly more physical, and one that Midwest and East Coast teams willfully exploit.

The average age of the top six players in Miami’s rotation this year was 22.5, which was slightly older than BYU and a roster seasoned by two-year Mormon missions. Syracuse has three starters – Rakeem Christmas, Michael Carter-Williams and James Southerland – who came to the Orange as 20-year-old freshmen. DaJuan Coleman, a part-time starter, is a 6-9, 288-pound freshman who turned 20 in October.

SDSU? Its two freshmen this season, Skylar Spencer and Winston Shepard, were 18 when practice opened last fall.

A big reason is the preponderance, and acceptance, of post-graduate prep academies in the East, where players spend a year after high school refining their academics (and, yeah, they might visit the weight room, too). Places like Hargrave Military Academy and the Tilton School have been around for decades. Only recently have any popped up in the West, and with mixed success.

Another factor is simple meteorology and biology.

“It’s cold in the winter,” Ohio State point guard Aaron Craft said at the West Region in Los Angeles last week. “You’ve got to stay indoors and find a hobby. I saw the sun for the first time in a couple weeks when we landed here on Tuesday.”

Bodies naturally retain weight to provide insulation against the cold. And with little else to do, basketball consumes your life.

“It’s a different dynamic,” says Carlson, who spent four seasons at Pitt in the Big East. “Kids out here, they’re walking into the gym in flip-flops with their shoes in a bag. Kids back East, they’re wearing their shoes everywhere.”

West Coast basketball has achieved success in the NCAA Tournament, and not just teams coached by John Wooden. Arizona, Utah, UNLV and Stanford have all been to a Final Four since 1990. But the only western representative in the last decade is UCLA, and those were teams coached by Howland, perhaps not coincidentally, espousing the wide-body, grind-it-out mentality he brought from Pitt.

And that was when officials still called fouls, still blew their whistle when your big man bumped the opposing point guard on a ball screen. Now: no autopsy, no foul.

Armstead smiles. It’s how the Shockers play – Marshall told them to play “angry” at the West Region last weekend – and how he grew up playing.

Tattooed across the right forearm of the kid who spent two years at Oregon is a silhouette of the Florence, Ala., skyline, with buildings and bridges from his rough-and-tumble upbringing. Above it are three words: “Envy my past.”